"The Selous ought to be set up under its own authority," Brian is saying, "financing itself and administering itself, not vulnerable to people who aren't really interested. That was the trouble down here when I left - lack of real interest. Now Costy Mlay, he was sent down here from Mweka, and he quickly understood the problems and saw the potential. Costy's the exception; he was interested, and he's still interested, even though he is no longer with the Game Department. Costy's very bright, and he's not a politician.
"To lose the Selous now would be such a dreadful waste, and especially when you realize that everything is present that is needed to administer it efficiently, all of the groundwork has already been done! For example, all the road alignment - when 1 was here, we were operating over three thousand miles of dry season tracks. And the placement and grading of the airstrips - that's done, too. They just have to be cleaned up again. There's even the nucleus of a good staff - the old game scouts who still know the country, who could train up a new corps of men, set up patrol posts. That's the first thing 1 would do if I ever came back here, get my old staff together to train up good new people, like some of these young porters we have here now. I'd try to persuade Damien Madogo to come back, and I'd get hold of Alan Rees. Rees was my right-hand man all the way through, he was principal game warden for the Western
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Selous - held the same official rank as 1 did. No story of the Selous would be complete without mentioning Alan; he was a fine hunter and a fine warden, conscientious and patient and very good with his staff, and in addition, he's a first-class naturalist; he just loves being out in the bush, rains and all, and his wife is the same way.
"The senior warden up there in Dar, Fred Lwezaula - he's all right, too. He's doing the best he can, considering the fact that nobody up there in Dar appreciates what they've got down here. There aren't many people in the government who even know where the place is! I don't think it's ever been brought home to them that the Selous is unique. It is not just a big empty part of the ordinary monotonous miombo country that takes up most of southern Tanzania; it's well watered, it's vast, it's almost entirely surrounded by sparsely populated country, it's an ecological unit - or several ecological units, as Alan Rodgers says - and there's nothing like it in East Africa. But the Selous has to be self-supporting if it is going to withstand all the demands for land and timber and the like that are bound to come; we proved it could support itself very easily, and build up the country's foreign reserves as well, and still remain the greatest game area in the world." The WSrden paused for breath, then concluded quietly, "If only for economic reasons, they owe it to the future of their country to see to it that this place doesn't disappear, because it's very precious, and it is unique -1 can't say it too often! There's nothing like it in East Africa!"
Both lion and leopard cough and roar intermittently throughout the night, but at daybreak there are no fresh tracks around the puddle of congealed blood, the pile of half-digested grass stripped from the gut, the sprawl of entrails, the mat-haired head with the thick twisted white tongue. Overhead, the moon is still high in the west, and shimmering green parrots, sweeping like blowing leaves through the river trees, chatter and squeal in the strange moonset of the African sunrise.
(Top left) Abdallah. (Top light) Goa.
(Bottom left) Davvid Endo Nitu. (Bottom right) Mata.
XI
By the time the buffalo was butchered it was late last night, and the Africans were exhausted; the meat was heaped in a big pile by the kitchen fire to discourage theft by passing carnivores, and this morning, under Goa's direction, Mata and Abdallah are cutting heavy Y-shaped posts and setting them into the ground. The posts will support a rack of strong green saplings, and under the rack a slow fire will be tended that will keep the meat enveloped in thick smoke. "This is a day they will always remember," Brian comments. "Down here in southern Tanzania, they have no livestock at all except a few goats and chickens; the poorer ones get hardly any meat. So this is a unique experience for most of them, perhaps the one time they will ever have it - the day on which they were actually paid to sit around and eat all the meat they could hold. Of course that used to happen with the elephants I had to shoot, but those people weren't paid for it, as these are." He describes how in the old days, traveling light on elephant control, he would camp next to the killed animal in this same way, living exclusively on elephant kidney and sweet tea and rice cooked in advance and packed tight into a sock - a clean sock, mind, he adds, with the trace of a smile.
1 take advantage of a day in camp to go off by myself and look for birds, walking alone up the sand river. By the dead buffalo, a vague cold smell of turning meat is mixed in a repellent way with fleeting sweet whiffs of bush orange, but soon there is only the faint mildew smell of the haze of algaes on the damp sand, which everywhere is cut by the tracks of
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animals; crisscrossing the marks of eland, kongoni, bushbuck, hippo, buffalo, and elephant are myriad patterns of unknown small creatures, and also the round pugs of lion and leopard. Smce I am barefoot, it would be difficult to circle through the bush if something came down into the river bed and cut me off from camp: I listen for the crack of limbs, the buffalo puff, the rhino chuff. Brian had recommended the services of Goa and his .458, but Brian himself has a poor opinion of Goa's marksmanship, and to observe birds with an armed escort —! Anyway, I wanted to get off by myself.
Walking alone is not the same as trudging behind guns; one stays alert. And although this is not the first time on this foot safari that I hear the wind thrash in the borassus palms, the moaning of wild bees, it is perhaps the first time that I listen. Walking upstream, I am shadowed for a while by a violet-crested turaco which moves with red flares of big silent wings from tree to tree, then hurries squirrel-like along the limbs, the better to peer out at me, all the while imagining itself unseen; occasionally it utters a loud hollow laugh that trails off finally into gloomy silence, as if to say, "Man, if you only knew ..." A large patch of blue acanth flowers on the bank is shared by the variable sunbird and the little bee-eater, and when I pause to watch the sunbird, a tropical boubou climbs out of a nearby bush and utters its startling bell notes at close range as its mate duets it from a nearby tree, then unravels the beauty it has just created with a whole run of froggish croaks that cause an ecstatic pumping of its black-and-cream-colored boubou being. Brown-headed parrots and a beautiful green pigeon climb about in a kigelia, which has also attracted a scarlet-chested sunbird. Cinnamon-breasted and golden buntings flit in separate small flocks across the river, and a pair of golden orioles skulks in a bush; ordinarily these shy birds frequent the tree tops. At a rock pool, perhaps a mile upstream, I watch striped kingfishers and a white-breasted cuckoo-shrike, and listen to a bird high in the canopy that I have never heard before and cannot see; its single note is a loud and clear sad paow! Circling it, waiting, listening, I am rewarded at last with the sight of a lifetime species, the pied barbet.
At camp, toward noon, the vultures are already gathering: fifteen griffons have sighted the buffalo carcass and are circling high overhead. But soon they have dispersed again, after swooping in low for a hard look; though nothing threatens vultures, they are wary birds, and too many humans for their liking come and go around our camp less than fifty yards away. There is a lion kill not far downriver, to judge from the resounding noise heard in the night; perhaps the vultures have gone there to clean things up.
In early afternoon, over the river trees, heavy rain clouds loom on the east wind. Then a light rain falls, and the returning griffons, accumulating in dead silence, fill bare limbs back in the forest with dark bird-like growths; at some silent signal, half a hundred come in boldly on
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long glides, feet extended; they strip the buffalo dry and clean within an hour.
By late afternoon the smoked meat is shrunk down to black curled twists of leather. The
Africans take turns tending it, and the others sit upright in a circle under the tamarind: the small-faced Mata, and tall Amede, and the small man with the child's wide-eyed face who is called Shamu, and the squealing Abdallah with the squint, and Saidi Kalambo in his big hair and huge blue boxer shorts, and the heavy boy in the red shirt who is called "Davvid" although he is a Mohammedan - "Davvid Endo Nitu," he insists firmly. And Kazungu says, "1 also have a foreign name of 'Stephen', but now I am proud of using my African name."
Only Goa does not join in as the others laugh and tell one another stories. Mzee Goa, as the Ngindo call him, Old IVfan Goa, lies flat out on a piece of canvas, making the most of his day of rest, staring up through the dark green leaves of adina and tamarind at the blue sky. On the tamarind bark over his head, a large agama lizard is pressing up and down in agitation, and not far away, on a broken elbow of a piliostigma, a tree squirrel sits calmly, observing the human camp. Across the sandy soil near my own feet, where I sit on my campaign cot before our tent, a blue-black hornet, hard tail flickering, is dragging a dying spider twice its size toward some dank hole where it can be sealed in with the hornet's eggs.
At dark, the Africans move up close to the kitchen fire, which dances and flickers on the naked skin of dark chests and arms; behind them rises a stand of tall pale grass, higher than their heads, and beside them, on a bed of adina fronds, lies the big pile of dried meat. In more places than one, I think, along the northern borders of the Game Reserve, groups of young Africans such as these must be smoking their poached meat around bush fires very much like this one.
Since his Swahili is excellent and since he enjoys the jokes as much as they do, Brian teases the Africans a lot, and the younger ones joke back at him, as much for their own amusement as for his. Like Kazungu, they are good-natured, never impertinent, there is no air of aggression in their merriment. Yet I notice that Goa, though he laughs sometimes at Bwana Niki's jokes, never volunteers a sally of his own; his is the last of the colonial generation. And the Warden retains the colonial manner with the Africans, giving orders in short and peremptory tones. Except in calling out a name - Kazungu! Goa! (he doesn't know the porters' names - they are all "Bwana") - he never raises his voice; intentionally or otherwise, he usually speaks in such low tones that Kazungu or Goa must come up very close to hear him, seating themselves on the ground before his feet. On the other hand - unlike lonides - he is never abusive or sarcastic, never shows anger even when exasperated, and takes the time to chat with them and make them laugh, though he is embarrassed when I ask him to translate one of the jokes. "Got to keep them simple,
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you know," he says, reverting to his old White Highlands manner. This time he has told the porters that if they keep on eating up the white man's food, they will grow very pale and their hair will straighten, and though a Mombasa Kenyan like Kazungu is too sophisticated for this jest, the Tanzanian country boys enjoy it.
I suspect Brian Nicholson of liking Africans, despite all the conventional prejudices he displays. If 1 had any doubts about this, most of them would be resolved by the evidence of my own eyes and ears that Africans, from the simplest of these porters to an urbane, well-educated man such as Costy Mlay, seem fond of Brian, whose fluent Swahili must convey subtleties of understanding and even concern that are absent in most whites. Unlike lonides, Brian was born in East Africa and has known and worked with Africans since he was a child. It is true that he has usually been in a superior's position with these people, which goes a long way to explain his preference for country Africans over those in the city, and no doubt he would agree with lonides that Western civilization has reduced many first-rate Africans to third-rate Europeans; 1 no longer bother to point out that, forced to adapt suddenly to an African culture, a first-rate European would certainly be thought of as a third-rate African, at least for the first few hundred years.
Kazungu, who can speak some English, is teaching me a little Swahili, and Brian teases him, saying that Kenyans don't really know how to speak it. "The Brits have really buggered up the Swahili language. Say fambo instead of Hujamhu just for a start. And then they answer 'Jambo', which is all wrong, too. Once asked an African up there, 'Ume elewal' which means. Do you understand? and he became frightfully offended - thought 1 was accusing him of being drunk. To be drunk is kulewa-not the same sound at all." And Kazungu laughs, nodding his head; he freely admits that these young Tanzanians speak better Swahili than he does, since for them it is not a lingua franca but a local tongue.
As camp cook and a man with a bit of English, not to mention experience of such cities as Nairobi and Mombasa, Kazungu has prestige among the porters. But he never abuses his position, in part because he is outnumbered six to one. This evening, in the only unpleasant tone 1 have heard in the past fortnight, Davvid Endo Nitu is informing Stephen Kazungu Joma that if the arrogant Kenyans don't behave themselves, the Tanzanian Army will march through their country as it did through Uganda, to teach them a lesson once and for all.
Brian doesn't think much of my argument that the temporary anarchy in Uganda is probably worth it to get Idi Amin out of power, although I back up my position by relating a story told to me by Maria's brother, now a doctor in Australia, who had done his colonial service in Kampala. One of Peter Eckhart's teammates on the rugby team was a young African giant who was already heavyweight boxing champion of Uganda and a marvelous athlete, Peter said, immensely powerful and
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very fast for his great size; what struck Peter, who is not liberal in any way and doubtless shares the political outlook of Brian Nicholson, was this man's gentleness and consideration toward all the white players and absolute ferocity toward other blacks - "murderous", to use Dr. Eck-hart's word, and a good word, too, in the light of later events. And then there was the warning that the British left the new leaders of Uganda when Independence came, concerning a young lieutenant named Idi Amin who was ruthlessly exterminating recalcitrant tribesmen up in Karamojong, how they were sure to have trouble with this fellow if they didn't bring him under control immediately ..,
And Brian shrugs, not because what I am saying is not true but because such excess is only to be expected on this continent: the bloody display of power is an African tradition. "Why was Amin any worse than that emperor up in Central African Republic, 'or the one in Guinea? Butchering people right and left, and nobody paid any attention." I cannot deny this. Who had concerned themselves about the deaths of the thousands massacred in Guinea by President Macias Nguema Biyogo? What could his Belgian friends reveal about political oppression under Colonel Joseph Mobutu, the Western puppjft still catering to European interests in Zaire? And hadn't the French cynically supported the "Emperor" Jean-Bedel Bokassa of the Central African Republic despite the well-documented knowledge that he had personally taken part in the massacre of two hundred schoolchildren?
We are edgy on this subject, and I am considering how to change it when I notice the bottle of whiskey that sits like a reproach beside my cot. Since wine and beer were too bulky and heavy, this bottle has been brought along for me instead, but in the well-being and exhilaration of the foot safari, I have felt no need for it; on the other hand I am mildly embarrassed, since it has been an extra weight in someone's load. Thoughtlessly I suggest that it be given to the staff, to celebrate when we reach the Mbarangandu, and Brian snaps, "Absolutely not! You Americans ruined your own natives with alcohol; leave ours alone!" I know he has taken advantage of an opening, and I know why, but I manage to repress a sharp retort about the echo of colonialism in that "your" and "ours"; his choice of words does not change the fact that he is right.
Tonight we have buffalo kidney to go with our rice and beans, and while we eat Brian describes how he had once been hurt by a buffalo that had been wounded by a "big-game hunter" from Dayton, Ohio. "That was in the Maasai Mara, about 1949, when I was learning the hunting safari business as assistant to a chap named Geoff Lawrence-Brown. We had followed up this fe
llow's wounded buffalo and it jumped out of my side of the thicket, right on top of me. I got two rounds off into this dark blur, and it went down, but not before it caught me with the outside of its horn and sent me flying. 1 was pretty badly banged up."
I ask his opinion of these "big-game hunters", and the Warden
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grunts. "Don't know much about these people, really. Only stayed in that business long enough to qualify for my professional hunter's license. 1 always had my eye on the Game Department, you see. But I will say that most of the professional hunters 1 knew had contempt for a lot of their clients. Some tried to find nice things to say, and were loyal to their clients whether they liked them or not, but there aren't many professionals of that caliber any more. And a number of clients simply weren't physically fit enough to track their animals, even if they had nerve enough to leave their Land Rovers. Sometimes they shot from the windows, or rested their rifles on the bonnet of the car; many animals are unafraid of cars, so they had them at point-blank range. Sometimes the hunter and his client got out of the car on the far side from the animal, using the car as a hide; as soon as the car moved out of the way, they shot, and later it was claimed that they hunted the animal on foot. The client forgets what he wants to forget by the time he gets back home.
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